


if I could light the world up for just one day

by samyazaz



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Character Study, Found Family, Friendship, Gen, Magic, Magical Accidents, Saving the World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-30
Updated: 2018-03-30
Packaged: 2019-04-08 11:04:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14103984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samyazaz/pseuds/samyazaz
Summary: Quil has always had fire in her.





	if I could light the world up for just one day

**Author's Note:**

> This was written as a post-campaign character study for my D&D character in a game that I played with sovin, lady_ragnell, and soc_puppet.
> 
> It's a fandom now, we've decided. You can find a more serious explanation of the campaign [here](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/The_Campaign_of_Five_Dragons/profile), and our very ridiculous fandom primer [here](http://theladyragnell.tumblr.com/post/172259729223/campaign-of-five-dragons-are-you-a-fan-of-taz). And if you're intrigued by any of this, we've got a couple fics up in our AO3 collection [here](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/The_Campaign_of_Five_Dragons/works), and plenty more soon to come.
> 
> I wouldn't say that we really had anything out of the ordinary for D&D happen in our game, but nevertheless, this fic comes with **warnings** for: systemic racism, demonic possession, time travel paradoxes and impossible decisions, deals with literal devils, non-explicit violence and minor character death of the sort you might expect from d &d, accidental drug use, and wholesale destruction of entire planes of existence.

Quil has always had fire in her.

It was easy, afterward, to say it was because of the rift, easy to point to the fireballs that she summoned unwittingly out of thin air and say it was the magic burning up inside her, but it’s not the truth.

The truth is that it’s always been there, lurking just beneath the surface. It was there when she was a child, scarcely big enough to walk at her mother’s side through the market, and she saw the mistrustful looks the adults sent her mother’s way, and she heard the things the children whispered to each other, words like  _ demon _ and  _ evil _ and  _ hell-bound _ .

It was there when she was slightly older, old enough to help in her mother’s shop, and she caught customers slipping bundles of herbs into their pockets and ducking back out the door, so they wouldn’t have to converse with her mother, so they wouldn’t have to hand their gold over to a tiefling.

Quil had run after them, shouting, and her mother had run after her and pulled her back, whispered,  _ Shh, shh, it’s all right _ in her ear.  _ Let them go, they must need it very badly, we can spare a sprig or two. _ And Quil had shaken in her mother’s grip and burst into horrible, furious tears because she knew that was a lie.

It was there when Eduard, the baker’s son, threw flour at her face and called her  _ devil _ while his father charged her mother twice as much for a small, misshapen loaf of bread half the size of what others walked out with. And Quil’s mother had grown wise to the anger that burned up in her, by then, but she still hadn’t been fast enough to stop the fist that Quil swung at the boy’s face.

The rift doesn’t give her her anger. It just gives another reason for people to be afraid of her. And for a time, it’s almost a relief -- at least this fear and mistrust is something she’s earned, something she deserves.

She tries to control it. She tries so hard, and she knows it makes things harder for her mother, for Cordelia, who’s already suffering under her own, unfathomable burden. Quil’s not used to her anger being turned inward, on herself, instead of held like a shield to ward off the world.

_ I should have been faster _ , she thinks, a mantra spinning around and around her head.  _ I should have been better. I should have kept her safe. I should have done more. _

It’s almost inevitable, when the anger burns her up and bursts out of her in a conflagration. It feels good, it feels purging, even as her skin blisters and peels beneath the heat. But when the flames fade and her vision clears, her mother’s shop is half burnt-up in ash and smoke, her mother and sister cowering behind a shelf and somehow, blessedly, miraculously unharmed. But for just an instant, as they peek their heads out around the corner of the shelf, they look at her the way everyone else has always looked at them, and she wants to scream and scream and scream.

She leaves, though Cordelia cries and her mother begs her not to. She leaves because it’s the only thing she can do for them. She can’t help Cordelia and she’s only a liability to their mother. She walks away, a sack full of her meager belongings on her back, and feels the flames licking up her ribs and igniting in her heart, turning her chest to an inferno.

It’s not fair. It’s not  _ fair _ . She’s tried to be good all her life, to be better than others believed her able to be, and now she’s lost everything.

She takes the name Tranquility, and for the first few months every time she introduces herself, every time someone uses the name, she wants to laugh, bitter and long. It’s what she aspires to, but it’s not what she is.

There’s a farmstead on the road between her cottage and the village. She passes it one day to find the barn engulfed in flames, spewing thick smoke into the sky, and the farmer standing with his livestock on the other side of the road, watching it burn.

“We had that rain a few nights back,” he says, when she asks him what happened. “Must’ve been a leak, and the hay got wet. Tried to dry it out, but--” He gestures to the flames, and gives a shrug that says,  _ Sometimes that’s just the way it is. _ “Nothing to do but let it burn itself out, now.”

She stands with him for a time, watching the fire lick up into the sky, and feels a strange sense of kinship with the hay. She knows what it’s like to show a cool, placid exterior while carrying a hot, smoldering heart deep within her. She knows, too, what it’s like when that heart bursts forth and sends everything around her up in flames, and then burns it down to ash.

She’s traded with the farmer on days when she doesn’t trust herself to venture into the village proper, with so many homes and people crowded around her, heedless of the danger she poses to them all. She brings him honey and he sends her home with eggs, or milk, or a basket full of vegetables, when the harvest has come. He’s always traded fair with her, never turned his nose up or looked at her askance for her skin or her horns or her hooves. He deserves better than this.

“When it’s time to rebuild,” she tells him, “send word, and you’ll have my aid.”

He glances at her and his gaze lingers, and then he nods his thanks. He doesn’t say what she’s already thinking: that she’s weak, unused to hard labor, that she’d be more hindrance than help to the work of raising a barn. But she can come and lend her support. She can bring her honey and pass out sweetened water to refresh the laborers. She stand here at his side and tell him that what happened wasn’t fair, as no one’s ever said to her. She can keep the fire in her in check for at least one day, and rebuild.

Her bees, too, are a comfort. It’s steady, rhythmic work, and there’s a satisfaction to be had in watching them at work, seeing their comb grow day by day. She understands them, she thinks. She knows the sharp, insistent buzz when the hive is angered, feels it in the same jittery restlessness that stirs beneath her own skin, and she understands their ferocity, their devotion to the hive, their willingness to sacrifice everything to keep it safe.

Then the letter comes, and kicks over the carefully-ordered life that she’s made for herself. A letter purporting to be from the king, and she’d laugh and throw it in the fire at that, because what interest could a king have in a village beekeeper?

But a letter from the king, promising her greatest desire, and that stays her hand.

She doesn’t believe any king could possibly even know she exists. And if he did, she can’t believe he’d know what it is she wants most. But…

But maybe. But she can’t ignore it, even if it’s the slimmest of chances. She’s given up everything for her family. For her mother. For Cordelia. What value does her dignity have, anyway, if its loss might see her sister saved?

So she goes, and tells herself it’s mostly out of curiosity, to see what it is a king thinks a humble beekeeper might want most in the world.

She meets the others, joins the others. She rides at their side, fights at their side, and silently wonders all the while when it’s going to go wrong. When the fire will burst from her, and they’ll look at her the way everyone else does, the way people have always looked at her.

She watches Kithri throw a strawberry plant through a judge’s window and covers her mouth to stifle a laugh, and can’t remember the last time she’s laughed at all.

And then it all goes wrong, Kithri trapped on the other side of barred doors and all she can hear is sounds of fighting and her heart is pounding in her chest and it’s so easy to throw her hands out before her and let the fire spill out, to burn away everything that stands between her and these newfound friends. She’s so scared, but the fire makes everything sharp and clear and focused.

They survive. They free the judge and leave Windell behind them, and continue on to Hylene. They wake a dragon and learn the terrible truth behind the king’s promises and Quil doesn’t know if she wants to laugh or be ill. Of course they were empty. Of course it was a trap. She should have known better than to hope there might be a way to save her sister, or that it might be so easy that a king would seek her out and drop the answer in her lap.

When the rift opens before their ship, she feels only a horrible, queasy terror. She grips the rail with fingers gone pale and bloodless as it pulls them through. She wants to run, to fight against the inevitable, to shout at the rift that it’s not going to do this to her again, it’s  _ not _ , but she’s frozen, everything in her turned to ice instead of fire. The rift yawns open and swallows them and her voice is as frozen as the rest of her, but inside her head, all there is is screaming.

She doesn’t remember when she went through the rift after Cordelia, but she doesn’t think it was like this, tossed into the middle of a fight Phi had already fought, then hurled just as quickly to another moment from her past, with a fortress and an ambush and Phi standing so strong, making decisions that Quil can’t fathom making.

She’s angry on Phi’s behalf, angry that she’s had to make this choice, angry that Phi won’t allow them to save her friend and spare her this pain. It’s a relief once the deed is done, the arrow struck true, and she can let loose her anger and burn down the attackers who have made her friend suffer this loss twice over.

_ I’ve lost everyone _ , she thinks later, as they bury him together.  _ I’d give anything not to have. Why wouldn’t you let us save him? _

She doesn’t understand Phi’s strength, but she admires it. She knows Phi chose pain for the sake of something she felt was good and important. Quil doesn’t know if she’d have it in her to make the same choice, were their situations reversed.

And then-- then they  _ are _ . Then they’re standing outside a tower that Quil knows from her nightmares, reaching high overhead, and her sister’s laughter is echoing off the stones, her footsteps receding inside the crumbling building even as Quil stands there, all the air knocked out of her lungs.

She thinks about Phi, standing strong in the face of impossible choices, thinks about her saying,  _ If we change this, it could change the future _ . And Quil knows she doesn’t have Phi’s strength because she thinks that and the fire roars up within her, it snarls a ferocious  **_Good_ ** and  _ It had  _ **_better_ ** and she runs, screaming her sister’s name. 

It’s a cruel joke, to come out at the top of the tower and find Cordelia gone, and a dozen and more portals waiting where there had only been one, in truth. She hurls herself into one headlong, too desperate to linger and dither over choices.

The fire rises up in her, crackling just beneath the surface of her skin. She burns down an entire plane of existence, watches the sky turn to flame and the grass light like kindling and feels only fierce satisfaction because at least now they’re not wasting time with impossible riddles. She tried to do it the right way, she did, but how long was she supposed to standing there walking nowhere, literally  _ nowhere _ , when her sister is somewhere and she needs her? When she has the chance to change what went wrong the first time?

And then, like a nightmare, she’s standing in front of the tower again, listening to Cordelia’s retreating footsteps again, running after her all over again. She throws herself through another rift, Phi stalwart at her side, and she’s more grateful than she has words to express to have her strength and her steadiness, anchoring her when the desperation and fear seem set to tear her apart.

They plunge through the rift, and step out into hell. And of course this is where they find Cordelia, of  _ course _ it is. Quil wants to cry. She wants to find a corner where she can drop to her knees and be ill.

She doesn’t falter when she stands before Asmodeus. There’s too much anger in her, stoked by the flames of hell itself. And there’s Phi at her side, with strength to spare.

It’s a shock to be told she has no soul, that old childhood taunt made manifest by the king of hell himself before her. But it’s a shock to come to terms with later, when Cordelia is safe, when her baby sister isn’t lost somewhere in the nine hells for the second time.

It’s Phi who finds her, level-headed where Quil cannot be. And it’s Quil who takes them home, Asmodeus’s gentle admonition ringing in her ears:  _ you can get her home, but there’s a price, your magic can only take so much you know _ .

She’s been paying for this choice for most of her life anyway. What does it matter to her, if she pays it once more? She’d have paid any price he named for Cordelia.

She lets loose the grip she’s held on her anger, on the flames burning bright inside her, and she sets fire to hell itself.

And when she comes out the other side of the portal, with Phi at her side but Cordelia gone, there’s nothing left of her. She’s a burned-out, hollowed shell, and she drops to her knees and sobs, Phi’s arm around her shoulders and her voice a meager comfort in her ears. 

What’s the use of even having a choice, if making it makes no difference at all?

 

She made the choice, and it changed nothing. The only difference is the price Asmodeus warned her about: her magic boiling up in her even more fiercely than it had been, slipping out of her grasp nearly every time she casts the simplest spell.

In a dark, underwater temple, they’re chased by a drider, running desperately as she hurls spears at them, and they’re not fast enough, they’re not going to make it, and Quil grabs her magic and  _ twists _ , rending the air itself so she can step through and come out farther away, putting just a few more precious yards between her and the drider. And when she passes through, she comes out to a world gone red and gold, fire exploding around her as her magic slips its leash and runs rampant.

The only meager consolation is that none of her friends were caught in the firestorm. It’s bad enough that she was, that she’s become a liability to them now when she wants to be an aid. They grab her and pull her to her feet, drag her along, and it means something that they do. It helps to ease the pain of her helplessness, at least a little.

A little, but not enough. They’re going to die here, deep beneath the sea with a drider’s spears buried in their backs. They  _ should _ die, but they don’t, because Valira, wonderful, brave Valira makes a deal with a demon to keep all of them safe.

Quil watches her around their campfires sometimes, wondering at the bits and pieces of her soul that Valira’s traded away for their sake, but never for her own. Quil gave her soul up entirely for Cordelia, and though she doesn’t remember making the bargain, she holds no doubt that she’d have done so a dozen times over to save her sister. But Valira trades hers away for them, who have only been friends for a few months now, and Quil doesn’t feel worthy of such a sacrifice.

She wonders sometimes, in their quieter moments, what it means to have given up her soul. She doesn’t feel its lack -- or she doesn’t think she does. Sometimes, she thinks about sitting down with Valira and asking to talk to the demon she carries with her now, to demand answers. But it seems cruel, when she’d only be seeking answers for her own sake, and when she has it so much better than Valira does. At least she doesn’t carry a poisonous voice around in her head, whispering lies and telling her her friends don’t love and value her. At least she never knew what she gave up.

Valira doesn’t change, even as she measures out pieces of her soul to trade to the demon in their moments of greatest need. She is kind and clever and brave, and that remains steadfast, and Quil takes some small comfort from that. On the horrible, bloody battlefield with the orcs, Valira takes wound after wound, staggers and picks herself back up and keeps on fighting, but Quil can tell she’s nearly reached the end of her strength. Quil runs to her, grabs her and twists the air around them again, pulling her away from the danger, and this time the fireball that explodes around her catches Valira in its flames, and finishes the job that the orcs had started, and Quil is never, ever going to forgive herself. But when the fight is done and the battlefield cleaned up, Phi’s ghost from her past burned and buried and spat upon for good measure, they settle around a campfire and Quil stays at the edge of the light, a carefully-measured distance away, shivering in her own skin at the thought what happened, what nearly happened.

And it’s Valira, of all of them, who comes to her and takes her hand and leads her gently back to the fire, back into the warmth of flame and friendship, Valira who tells her she’s not afraid of her even as she sits there with her hair singed, her face streaked with soot, her clothes ashy with it, and Quil chokes on her tears.

Valira tells stories around their fires as they travel, whispered tales about her family, her parents, her cousins. Eventually she tells the tale of their loss, how she acted to save her people and they shunned her because of it, and Quil’s anger boils and churns inside of her at how her friend’s been mistreated, how she’s suffered at the hands of those who should have loved her best. But Valira just shrugs and smiles sadly and takes that burden on her own shoulders, as she took the demon, as she’s taken so much.

Quil doesn’t understand how Valira can have endured such betrayal and not be angry about it. She’s livid on Valira’s behalf. But Valira is accepting of their judgment, accepting of their rejection, and doesn’t seem to seethe at the unfairness of it all the way Quil would have. The way Quil does.

Valira’s a better person than Quil knows how to be, but Quil watches her, and tries to learn from her example. She tries to be calm, to accept the things that would ordinarily make her burn hot with anger. 

In the Underdark, she stumbles in a patch of myconids and finds herself somehow, incongruously, back in Some Hole with Valira, her head as fuzzy as if she’s spent an entire evening drinking. She and Valira giggle with each other, clutch at each other, and find themselves lamenting the fact that they never relax, why don’t they ever just take the time to  _ relax _ .

Phi pulls them away from the myconids and back to the Underdark, back to reality. But Quil remembers that conversation and she tries, she  _ tries _ . She thinks it would be so nice to relax, that they’ve all earned it. But she doesn’t know how, not when they’re constantly running from danger and struggling for their lives. Not when there are dragons scattered around the world who they’re trying to warn, who they’re trying to  _ save _ , and no matter how fast or strong or clever they are Seath is faster, is stronger, is better, he gets there first or sweeps in behind them and kills them all the same. Amano dies in his volcano before they ever have the chance to warn him of the danger. Lordren dies despite being the first warned and the one who set them on this path to begin with. Quil pulls off a miracle, casting a spell she shouldn’t be capable of without losing her grip on her magic and they find themselves in a castle in the sky, floating on clouds, greeted by an immense white dragon who offers them the promise of strategy, of respite, and it feels like the first chance she’s had to draw a full breath of air in months.

And then even that is ripped from them with the sound of a siege in the middle of the night, Seath’s people here where it should have been impossible to follow, where Eleum Loyce should have been safe and  _ had _ been safe, until they came. And then they’re running again, scrambling again, and Quil carries with her the heavy, sharp certainty that they brought this on him, that somehow despite everything they’re trying to do, they’re the ones leading Seath to the dragons they’re trying to save.

They’re ripped through planes again, sent to do Seath’s work despite themselves, sent to attack another group of adventurers and Quil’s so tired of it all, she’s  _ so tired _ . Her friends shame her with their generosity and their patience, trying to explain themselves to the other adventurers, trying to convince them, when everything inside of Quil is screaming  _ we don’t have time for this! _

And in the middle of it all, Kithri snaps, “No romance!”, directed at the three of them as much as at the four strangers, and Quil turns and stares at her, so taken aback by the very idea that it forces a strangled, bitter laugh out of her, because how can she even think about romance when everything she touches burns?

They take Haoti under their wing, a man who tried to kill them, who delivered them to Seath and who’s been killing dragons at his behest, and Quil seethes quietly at that, too. They learn he carries a demon with him like Valira does, that he’s traded away more of his soul to it than Valira has, and Quil looks at him, bitter and twisted and more interested in power than what’s right, and Yondalla tells them that somehow  _ he’s _ a worthy trade for a god who’s been nothing but kind to them, and she loses what little faith she had that she might have traded her soul without trading away the essence of who she is. If Haoti was a noble man, worthy enough to take a god’s place, and he’s become  _ this, _ then what hope does Quil have at all?

They make allies. They make a plan. They run across oceans, across continents, weaving a web to trap Seath in, and for once Quil starts to think that maybe they might actually manage it. They set up an ambush with friends and allies at their backs, and Seath throws them one last trick, ripping them through dimensions to some sort of maelstrom, facing off against the adventurers he set them after before, but they’re stronger now, and they’re angry, of course they’re angry.

It’s a brutal, ugly fight. Quil and her friends are hurting long before the end of it, and just when they think they might be able to squeak out a victory in this war of attrition, the other group’s cleric heals up all the damage they’ve managed to deal them, and they attack with renewed vigor. A year’s worth of rage and desperation builds up in Quil until there’s no containing it, and she throws her hands up and tears open the sky, calls forth massive, fiery meteors to rain down upon them, breaking the earth and sending it all up in flames. It sends the others running, those who are still capable of doing so, and she’s burning up from within but it’s not from anger this time. She flops on her back in the sand, when the maelstrom spits them back out on Amano’s abandoned island, and grins fiercely up at the sky, burning bright with the knowledge that she helped her friends, that she saved her friends, that finally for once her magic did something good and useful and right.

There’s little time to bask in it, with Seath’s shadow already on the horizon, racing towards them. She scrambles to her feet and sways at Paladine’s blessing, at having somehow managed to earn the friendship of a god. And then Seath is upon them and there’s nothing to do but fight.

In this fight, and the one that follows when Lloth splits open the ground and ascends from the Abyss -- Lloth who makes Arfil look white even as he hurls spells at her, Lloth who makes Kithri go wild-eyed even as she spits invectives at the goddess’s face, and Quil wishes she could pull them both to her and shield them from this -- when it’s all done, Quil staggers and grabs onto the nearest one of them to keep herself on her feet, and marvels quietly at the realization that she scarcely landed a blow on either of them. 

She expects to feel anger at that, or frustration or disappointment burning in her at the very least. But she looks around at the faces of her gathered friends, of Kithri who’s standing over Seath’s fallen body, dwarfed by it but looking fierce in her victory, of Phi, who’s so strong and brave in her own right, who wades into battle and puts herself in the way of blows meant for the rest of them, of Valira, who looks stunned and pleased by the sudden departure of the demon she’s carried with her for so long, and at the others too -- Lauren and Keene at the cannon’s side, looking sweaty and disheveled, the mammoths and their riders, who took so much damage in this fight that wasn’t their own, Arfil, Idilus -- she looks at all of them, sweating and bleeding there in the sands with each other, and for once, she doesn’t lament the fireballs she never had a chance to throw. She feels only a warm glow of satisfaction at all they’ve accomplished together, at the role that she played, lending them strength and speed, giving them every advantage she could even if it meant she landed no blows of her own.

She flops onto her back in the sand once more, gasping up at the blue sky above her and working to fit her mind around the thought that they’ve done it, they’ve  _ won _ . And when her friends come over and lean over her, faces smiling but a little worried, she smiles back at them and reaches a hand up, lets them help her to her feet.

“Let’s go home,” she says, and she’s not sure where home is anymore, but they’ll figure that out together.

The sky is clear and vast above them and her friends are whole and hale at her side, and for once, the fire in her is quiet.


End file.
